head to head · open source
Ollama vs dagster
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars, 17,917 forks, 3,957 open issues and last shipped yesterday. dagster has 16,169 stars, 2,294 forks, 2,589 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Ollama leads on adoption by 1,020% (181,161 vs 16,169 stars). Ollama is written in Go under MIT; dagster is written in Python under Apache-2.0. Ollama has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, dagster 14%. Ollama was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Ollama | dagster | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 181K | ★ 16K |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Written in | Go | Python |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-09-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 18K | ⑂ 2.3K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Ollama if
- You weight community size — 181K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick dagster if
- You want the dagster feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Python
- You evaluated both and dagster fits your workflow better
About Ollama
Ollama is a Go based, MIT licensed runtime that downloads and runs open source large language models such as DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, GLM, MiniMax and gpt oss locally on a user's own machine, and it is aimed at developers and teams that want model inference without routing prompts through a hosted API.
read the full Ollama overview →
About dagster
Dagster is a cloud native data pipeline orchestrator written in Python and released under the Apache 2.0 licence, built for data engineers, data scientists, and machine learning teams who declare the tables, data sets, models, and reports their pipelines should produce and need those assets tested, observable, and kept up to date from local development through production.
read the full dagster overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Ollama or dagster more popular?
Ollama has 181,161 GitHub stars and dagster has 16,169. Ollama has the larger community by that measure.
Are Ollama and dagster free?
Both are open source. Ollama is licensed under MIT and dagster under Apache-2.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Ollama and dagster?
Ollama is written in Go and dagster in Python. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Ollama or dagster?
Choose Ollama if you want the larger community (181,161 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose dagster if its feature set, stack or Apache-2.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.